Locus Specific Databases and Diagnostic databases

The beginning of this week myself and Paul Flicek were in lovely Rotterdam at the Gen2Phen kick off meeting, an EU project lead by Tony Brookes from Leicester. Like all large European projects, the kick off meeting is a get-to-know everyone, have beers (very good ones in Holland) and get a feel for the project.

For me, the exciting thing was getting closer to the locus specific databases – in the project is Johan den Dunnen (from just down the road in Leiden, Holland) and Andy Devereau (from Manchester) who run locus specific databases and diagnostic databases respectively. Getting this valuable data coordinated with genome data (and the fiddly bit is about sequence coordinates, at least at first) is going to be great thing to do.

There’s lots to do in this area – certainly this is something that effects all the big browsers (UCSC, NCBI, ourselves) and has a had a long history of complex systems and sociological tensions in getting things sorted. But my sense in this small room hidden away in the Erasmus medical centre was that we had good people in the room, committed to finding a good solution whilst understanding the complexity of problem. Next up will be more technical meetings, but it was an excellent start. Don’t expect anything tomorrow, but I think we can expect something end of 2008/2009.